As frontline nurses and healthcare workers in Kentucky, we are saddled with tremendous responsibilities. We are legally held accountable for each patient we care for, even while strictly following directions issued by administrators many of whom lack medical licensure. This creates a systematic imbalance and leads to a lack of accountability at administrative levels. We wholeheartedly believe this situation needs immediate attention.

    Our appeal is to the Kentucky General Assembly to pass legislation requiring licensure for hospital healthcare administrators supervising clinical staff or making decisions affecting patient treatment. This important step would not only increase the quality of healthcare services provided, but it would ensure decisions made for patients stem from education, formal training, and appropriate certification. It would also ensure that decisions that affect patient and staff safety would not be made without the legal responsibility for those decisions being shared by the administrators making them. 

    A simple example is a regional manager, non-clinical, telling staff "Never pass a call light." The nurses are obliged to obey this directive. A nurse is going to retrieve a patient with chest pain from the lobby, but a call light goes off; they follow the manager's directive and stop, the patient who activated the call light is frantic, asking about their test results, requesting food, and attempting to get out of bed, in the 5 minutes it takes the nurse to address the patients questions, the patient in the lobby has collapsed in cardiac arrest. The nurse is then held accountable for not responding immediately to the chest pain patient. But if she had passed the call light, and nothing serious had occurred with the chest pain patient, she would have been reprimanded for passing the call light. 

    An equally concerning issue is the growing feeling of being unprotected among health workers. A survey found that more than half of Kentucky's healthcare workers feel unsupported as they carry the overwhelming responsibility of patient well-being (Kentucky Nurses Association, 2020). Through this reform, we can bring balance to the healthcare system—accountability should not rest solely on the hands of healthcare workers but should be shared by those making critical, potentially life-affecting decisions.

Join us in our drive to bring balance, equity, and justice to the healthcare system in Kentucky. Sign our petition and support our call for mandatory licensure for healthcare administrators at all Kentucky hospitals.